Endless Night
by UnnamedElement
Summary: Burt is ill; Kurt is alone. This story has been abandoned due to radical changes in the last bit of Season 2. I am a canon-nerd and cannot break from it so... Goodbye, Endless Night. Feel free to message me with ideas if you're so inclined
1. Where has the starlight gone?

Hi, and welcome to my newest Glee story! I'm putting "My Name is Kurt Hummel and this is My Personality" on hiatus until I finish this one.

DISCLAIMER:I do not own Glee nor am I affiliated with FOX or any of the actors herein represented, though if there are ever open auditions for future seasons so help me god I WILL get there and I will not hold myself accountable for any of my actions thereafter. :D

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He flipped open his phone, thought for a moment, and then skillfully dialed the required number as he organized his sheet music with the other hand. As the phone rang, he rapped his fingers on the black lid of the piano impatiently, feeling the little shock waves within each finger every time one would hit the wooden surface. Finally, she picked up, her quaking and frail voice resounding surprisingly loudly in his ear.

"Hello? I'm in the middle of a lesson. Do be quick."

He pressed two fingers onto the raised golden "E" and "O" on the front of his practice book, "Arpeggios," splaying them awkwardly as he spoke. He could hear a childish C major scale being picked out in the background.

"Hi, Ms. Ronsard. It's Kurt Hummel. I'll be unable to make my five o'clock lesson today and just wanted to let you know."

"Is everything okay, dear? You haven't missed in three years, you know."

Kurt almost smiled, bringing the hand off his book to push a fallen piece of hair from his eyes. "Oh, yes, of course. My dad just needs some help in the shop this afternoon. It's a busy time of year."

He resisted rolling his eyes at his pathetic lie, though he new she couldn't see him. November was no busier than any other time of year in the shop, but his life was certainly busy, with the SAT, the ACT, AP classes, preparations for sectionals and the fall theatre show, both failing friendships and blossoming ones as well as a community theatre production of _Oliver _that he'd gotten himself roped into. Junior year was hardly relaxing.

"Alright, honey, see you next week. Tell your father I say hello."

Kurt wished her well and hung up the phone. He sunk onto the piano bench, his normally perfect posture slumping considerably as he fumbled in the pocket of his powder blue, cashmere, _J. Crew_ cardigan that he'd bought for himself as a consolation prize of sorts the week before; it had, unfortunately, drained his "Fashion and Superfluous Items" fund, however. As he pulled out a crumpled 3x5 notecard, one side on which he had written keywords to prompt him during his Spanish _presentación__ oral_ he'd given the previous week, a horrible and very grounding thought asserted itself in his mind—he would not be able to keep up this guise forever. It had only been a week and his grades were slipping, his father's shop work slowing, his performances weakening, and his sleep suffering.

Kurt sighed and rubbed the hand not holding the notecard across his eyes, trying to clear his mind as he nervously fingered the card. He'd called and visited multiple times over the past week or so, but the anxiousness was something he did not think he could ever get used to.

He finally corrected his posture and smoothed the side of the worn notecard opposite his Spanish notes face up. He carefully and reverently typed in the ten digit number into the phone's keypad. It rang several times before a receptionist answered.

"Hello, Lima Memorial Health System. How may I help you?"

Kurt paused and swallowed hard, his fingers tracing the stripes of the fall season's hottest cords that ran up and down his legs. He dug his fingers into the soft fabric, pinching it and the skin beneath so that his thigh twinged slightly in response to the abuse. He brushed his pants off one more time before properly crossing his legs and speaking into the phone.

"Hi, I'm Kurt Hummel and I was calling to check on the condition of my father, Burt Alwin Hummel. I think he was supposed to be moved from ICU today."

"Just one moment, sir, let me look him up for you," her honeyed voice sprinkled with a slight Midwestern drawl grated at his ears, and he resisted saying something biting and sardonic just because he could.

Instead, however, Kurt listened vaguely to the clicking of her nails upon the keyboard as he let his mind wander until his fingers alighted again upon the notecard he had flattened onto the closed piano before him. He flipped it over and began reading the speech he had given for his Spanish midterm. The top of the card had a _2 _with a circle around it penned it vibrant emerald ink under which the detailed notes on his family continued in loopy script:

"—madre está muerto. Pero mi padre y yo vivimos junto al taller mecánico donde mi papá ha trabajado para muchos años. Yo le ayuda muchísimo y me parece que él es el padre más simpático en todo el mundo. Aún cuando hablo profundamente de Broadway o Oscar de la Renta, él me escucha y en estos momentos yo sé que haría cualquier cosa para que él sea feliz y se sienta cómo—"

"—_mother is dead. But my father and I live beside the garage where my father has worked for many years. I help him a lot and it seems to me that he is the kindest father in the world. Even when I talk about Broadway or Oscar de la Renta a lot, he listens to me, and in those moments I know that I would do anything so that he might be happy and feel that—"_

His throat clenched and he looked anywhere but at the card. Kurt was hardly paying attention when the typing ceased and the receptionist's twangy voice sounded on the line again. He was barely aware of the words she told him. However, as he hung up the phone, shoved the card back into his pocket, adjusted the middle button of his cardigan, roughly pushed his books and sheet music into his satchel and slung it over his shoulder, he was all too aware of the tear that had made it's way to the right corner of his mouth.

It tasted bitter as he swept out the side door of the choir room and burst into the early November air, the four o' clock sun burning his pale eyes. They alighted upon his car a hundred yards away in the upperclassmen area of the parking lot and suddenly a few more tears joined the first on his cheeks; he knew the logical thing to do.

As he strode towards his Baby, a few jocks stepped into his way, but he locked his jaw and pushed toward them, saying, "Excuse me, son on a mission here. Go entertain your intellectually impoverished brains elsewhere, or at least go back inside so you might prevent your room temperature IQs from dropping anymore in this keen, brumal air." Their confusion with his diction provided him the ten steps he needed to successfully get to his car, unlock it, and clamber into the steep seat of the Escalade.

He put it into drive, navigated out of the school, pulled out onto the main road and drove until he pulled into the parking lot of a used car lot a block over from his house and father's garage. He yanked the keys out of the ignition, pulled all the official paperwork on the car out of the glove box on the passenger side and steeled himself as he jumped out of the car and walked confidently into the lot's office.

He dropped the paperwork and key onto the desk dramatically, garnering the attention of the employee behind the counter.

"Excuse me," Kurt managed, "how much will you pay for a 2008 Escalade with 5,298 miles on it?"

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Thank you for reading and please do review!


	2. Dark is the day

Hi, and welcome to the second installment of this Kurt-centric fic! :)

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Ryan Murphy's _Glee_, Elton John's _The Lion King_, or Kate Chopin's _The Awakening_.

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Kurt listened to the man's estimate and then raised a practiced eyebrow, before requesting to speak with his manager as he knew for a _fact_, he enunciated, that his car was worth far more than what he had proposed and emphasized his statement by whipping a business card for _Hummels' Tire and Lube _from beneath the paperwork and sliding it across the counter, his smile a perfect mix of innocence and menace.

Kurt quickly closed the deal, returning to the lot with the employee as he pulled his personal belongings from below seats and within compartments, shoving all his CDs and various brushes and emergency fashion kits into his bulging satchel. He leaned on the polished hood of the car as he signed the formal agreement and accepted the hefty compensation from the employee, who stood awkwardly as Kurt slung a jacket he'd found beneath a seat over his shoulder and gave his Baby one last thump goodbye. He slowly made his way home, letting himself into the garage and passing by his father's message machine that flashed the number _15_ by a pot of cold coffee. He would deal with those later.

He pushed open the door to the basement and stumbled down the stairs, his perfect posture failing him as he looked about the finished basement. His coveralls lay on his perfectly made bed, soiled with the grease and oil he had neglected to wash out the night before.

Kurt threw his school bag and salvaged items from his vehicular sacrifice onto the floor and pulled open his sock drawer, stuffing the money he'd gotten for the car in the back of it before turning to the mirror and beginning to brush the stiff product out of his hair. He selected a red headband and pulled it over his ears, pushing it further back to keep the hair from his eyes. He stripped off his delicate cardigan and soft undershirt to replace it with a holey t-shirt from the Lima Arts Magnet Middle School he'd gotten when he was younger. As he slid out of his cords and folded them beside his sweater, he scoffed at how small he looked in his boxers before striding across the room and pulling his coveralls on, exchanging his leather dress shoes for a pair of worn converse.

It was as he reached across his bed to his nightstand that his breath hitched. All Kurt had wanted to do was grab the audio CD of _The Awakening _that he needed to have read for AP Lit by tomorrow afternoon at 1:05 so he could hand in the essay he hadn't yet written even though he had indeed already read the novel but that was three years ago and _oh god how he had HATED the ending_ but then the picture on his bedside table caught his eye and his breath hitched and a rattling sound came out of his chest before he collapsed onto his bed in a fit of sobs that he had withheld for a week.

As he succumbed to the tears, he couldn't clear his head of the photo. It showed a triumphant, four-year-old Kurt holding his mother's lipstick in one hand and a wrench much too large for his small hand in the other. On one foot was a tap shoe and on the other was one of a pair of sensible heels. His small body was adorned in miniature coveralls. On either side of him kneeled his mom and his dad. His mom ruffled his hair playfully, smiling adoringly at him. His father had a strong arm over his tiny shoulders, hands sticky with grease as he smirked at the camera. Kurt's expression made him look like a ridiculously incorrigible toddler.

Kurt could not deal with all of this right now. He suddenly sat up from the bed and grabbed the audio CD, shoving his cell phone into the chest pocket of his coveralls. With a final sniffle, he ran up the basement stairs and shut the door behind him as he quickly crossed the garage to the blinking message machine. He sighed and slumped into his father's chair, pouring himself a cup of cold coffee. Three cars in the shop to fix, fifteen messages to answer, an essay to write, a solo to practice, lines to memorize for an off-book on Friday, and a Spanish test to study for. He took a swig of coffee and pushed the play button on the messages, pushing the hairs that had escaped his headband behind his ears and rubbing a hand across his face to clear it of any stray shiny spots before he had to shove his hands into the heart of some decrepit and dirty 1974 Chevy.

As he scrawled down names, phone numbers, and car types, he hummed a song quietly to himself. It wasn't until the mechanical female voice proclaimed "End of Messages" that Kurt realized what it was. He sang a few lines aloud to himself as he poured some more coffee and crossed to the boombox his dad kept in the garage.

_Home is an empty dream  
Lost to the night  
Father, I feel so alone._

And it was all he could do to not collapse right then and there. Leave it to the _Lion King_'s lyrics to leave him defenseless and fumbling with the volume on the CD player.

So as the stuffy voice of a middle-aged British woman mumbled through Chapter Six of Edna Pontelier's troubles (_"The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation..."_), Kurt silenced his inner monologues and internally packaged all his worries into perfectly labeled boxes to be neatly dealt with later as he began to hum a mindless pop song. He fell in rhythm with Taylor Swift's beats and Edna's woes and settled somewhere in between consciousness and unconsciousness as his hands dove under the hood of a beat-up minivan, working completely on auto pilot as he pulled and twisted and checked and finally fixed the problem after two hours had passed and he'd yet to actually fill out the form that lay on the roof of the car before he had even started.

He breathed in sharply when he saw the name on the repair request form, scrawled in far too familiar handwriting. The car belonged to William Schuester, and he was supposed to have had it done and returned to the school lot by Monday. It was Wednesday. Well, it had been Mr. Schue's Spanish essay that had put him three cars behind until Tuesday evening, so he supposed, somewhat bitterly, if anyone was to blame for getting the car back late, it was Mr. Schuester himself. And if anyone was to blame for Kurt maybe just _maybe_ not scraping an A tomorrow on his Spanish test, then he'd probably just have to blame Mr. Schuester again. And if Mr. Schuester asked how Mr. Hummel was doing when Kurt parked Mr. Schuester's car in the teacher's lot tomorrow morning, he would say he was fine and had just had a bit of a cold and _you can imagine how busy family businesses can get_. And Mr. Schuester would nod and ask if he could do anything so Kurt would smile serenely and try to pick some grease out from beneath his otherwise perfectly clean fingers, denying his offer, and then Mr. Schuester would nod hesitantly and walk off.

Oh, how Kurt wished it would all just fall into place, that his work would get done and his pieces rehearsed and the _damn cars fixed_ because as much as he loved his father he just did not love cars.

He slammed the hood of Mr. Schuester's van shut and poured himself another cup of coffee as his stomach growled. He began jacking up the car beside Mr. Schue's and examined the front axel as he began to weave the lyrics he had been singing previously between Chopin's descriptions of Edna Pontelier ("_Edna was glad to be rid of her father when he finally took himself off with his wedding garments and his bridal gifts, with his padded shoulders, his Bible reading, his "toddies" and ponderous oaths…"),_ who he thought quite the ungracious bitch.

Just as he reached the chorus about the night ending and loneliness dissipating, he heard a tinny knock on the flimsy garage doors of the shop. Kurt gasped. No one in his right mind would need his car fixed at… He glanced at the clock on the coffee pot. 11:23 PM. He approached the door cautiously, picking up a crowbar to use as a weapon if necessary and readjusting his headband before taking a defensive stance and pressing the button mounted on the wall, raising the garage door.

Kurt did not immediately lower the crowbar upon seeing who stood on the other side. As the last of the garage door wound itself into the ceiling with a grainy _clunk_, Will Schuester looked Kurt up and down with a quirked half-smile.

"Well, good evening, Kurt. I had forgotten you were one of the Hummels in _Hummels' Tire and Lube_."

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Thank you for reading and please do review! Love, Elizabeth


	3. How can I find my way home?

Hi, and welcome to the third installment of my newest fic.

Disclaimer: I own neither Glee, Lion King, or The Awakening. :)

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"The cab wouldn't take me all the way to my house," Mr. Schue explained, "so I had him stop here, hoping your dad would be in. I know he works late, and I could use my car back if you're done with it."

Kurt lowered the crowbar and shifted his weight awkwardly, putting one hand on his hip as he strode to the back of the shop, impatiently gesturing for Mr. Schue to follow. "I'd—We'd meant to get it back to you bright and early Monday morning, Mr. Schue, but we've just been so busy, you know. Thanksgiving travel check-ups and major reconstructive surgery."

Mr. Schue nodded, taking in Kurt's dirty and ragged appearance, his gaze lingering on the dark circles and puffy bags beneath his eyes that were not visible underneath cleverly applied stage make up and lights that washed out everyone's faces. A white and red patch was attached with a safety pin to the right strap of his coveralls, the cursive _t _in _Kurt _starting to unravel from the bottom up. He glanced at Kurt's hands, covered in grime, delicate fingers showing signs of wear as he traced the lettering that popped up from the surface of the crowbar.

Mr. Schuester swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly becoming dry.

"Where's your dad, Kurt?"

Kurt stiffened slightly, placing the crowbar on the counter beside the coffee pot and slowly lifting the mug of cold coffee to his lips, cradling it delicately between smudgy hands and sipping daintily before placing it gently down and running a hand across his forehead, the shiny line of grease glistening in the shop lights as he turned to regard Mr. Schue.

"He's ill," Kurt said with calculated evenness. "He's sleeping."

Mr. Schuester stared at Kurt for a moment, as if trying to ascertain the validity of the statement. In his defense, Kurt thought, the statement was perfectly truthful. He'd just happened to leave out the specifics concerning severity and location. Finally Mr. Schuester nodded.

Kurt picked up the form from the roof of the car and dove his hand into his chest pocket, pulling out his cell and beginning to rapidly punch numbers into the calculator on his phone, scowling as the keys became coated in dust and muck.

Mr. Schue chuckled amusedly at his Kurt_ness_.

Kurt scrawled a number on the form and handed it to Mr. Schuester.

"It's forty-two fifty," Kurt said as the form exchanged hands. "The part would have made it eighty two, but we took so long to fix it I've thrown that bit in as compensation." Kurt shrugged and fished the keys to the minivan out of his pocket. "I hope this thing'll keep running for you, Mr. Schue. It's got quite a bit of character." He let out a dry laugh.

Mr. Schue pulled his wallet out and handed over the cash, watching Kurt concernedly. Kurt ducked his gaze, avoiding any look of pity that might cause him to crack and break down in front of his most respected teacher and coach. Mr. Schue handed two twenties and some ones to Kurt as Kurt's stomach growled tremendously.

"Look, Kurt," Mr. Schue said as he slipped into the car and slid his keys into the ignition, eyes scanning the garage to determine how to maneuver the car out without causing any damage to the boxes of tools Kurt had apparently recently organized and meticulously labeled in his elegant handwriting, "Tomorrow are the parent teacher conferences for the language and music departments."

Kurt's eyes widened. He'd never been needed at one of those plebeian things before.

Mr. Schue laughed. "You or your grades are not in trouble, Kurt. Don' worry. I'd just like to speak to you and your dad during the 3:15 slot. I think you may be advancing at such a pace that silly Spanish "telenovelas_" _like _La Catrina, Cuarto Misterioso, _and _Destinos _will really have very little educational effect. I'd like to perhaps move you into an independent study until we can get you into the AP Language class next semester if you're—"

Kurt abruptly cut him off, wiping his hands on a white and red checked bandana that hung from one of the belt loops on his coveralls. "You know I would be interested in that, Mr. Schue. I really love languages. But I have a prior appointment tomorrow afternoon," he shifted, feeling slightly uncomfortable omitting the truth and not telling Mr. Schue that the appointment was with his father's doctor to determine further action as somehow that particular responsibility had fallen to his measly sixteen and eleven-twelfth year old self who was supposed to somehow be able to decide these sorts of things, "and my father has instructed me to let him alone while he's sick because he can't afford to fall anymore behind in the shop right now. I'm sure you understand. Perhaps you and I could work something out tomorrow during your lunch period? Believe me, I have no problem missing gym and, anyway, nobody should have to watch Coach Tanaka get chub rub as his short shorts chafe his sausage legs; I had enough of that during football," Kurt laughed, but the smile did not reach his eyes.

Mr. Schuester did not miss the sadness in his smile but decided to play along for Kurt's sake. The CD clicked to an end. Apparently Edna had run out of things to complain about.

"Alright then," Mr. Schue agreed. "11:00 AM it is."

He slid out of the car, walking closer to Kurt and putting a hand on his shoulder. Kurt hesitantly looked up into the taller man's face.

"Does that by any chance mean I don't have to take the exam tomorrow?" Kurt asked slyly.

Mr. Schuester laughed. "If you've got too much on your plate, you can just write me a two page, double spaced essay on Oscar de la Renta or something that interests you and turn it in on Monday. It doesn't matter to me. I know you can handle _ser/estar_."

"Thanks, Mr. Schue," Kurt mumbled, suddenly self conscious that Mr. Schue had seen him working in his dad's shop while wearing the most atrocious clothes he owned.

"Nah, it's no problem."

Mr. Schue pulled Kurt into a sudden hug, and Kurt had to do everything in his power not to crumble into the chest of his teacher at the simple gesture of human contact.

Mr. Schue pulled away and pressed a granola bar into his hand. "You eat that, Kurt. I can't have my best countertenor passing out on me at rehearsal tomorrow, now can I? Your stomach has been growling this whole time."

Kurt didn't point out that he was Mr. Schue's only countertenor.

Mr. Schue hopped back into his car and started the ignition. "Oh," he exclaimed, opening the door for one second more, "You should talk to Mercedes, Kurt. She asked me if I knew what was up with you today. Something about you breaking three shopping dates, a make over, and a movie marathon, which all sound like pretty serious friendship infringements to me." He winked and put his foot to the gas as he slowly eased the car out of the garage and onto the street outside Kurt's house.

He pulled down the street a few houses, and then pulled Emma's number up on his phone, unconcerned that the digital clock in his car glowed 12:17 AM. As it rang, he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, watching the light from the Hummels' garage disappear as the shadow of a slender figure yanked the large garage door shut.

When Emma answered with a confused, "Hello? Will? What's wrong?" all he could manage was "It's Kurt, Emma. There's something wrong with him. He's sad and tired and dirty and working in his father's shop at 12 AM on a school night. I know you've talked to him before so... Do you think you could—"

And as Will Schuester pulled down the street in his newly repaired minivan, Kurt Hummel slid down the massive door of the garage to settle on the dusty floor, vaguely glancing at the granola bar Mr. Schue had slipped into his hands. _Peanut Butter Crunch._ Too bad he didn't eat peanut butter.

The granola bar fell from his fingers and he heard the oats crunching upon contact with the floor before the package rebounded slightly and landed with a flat, weak crinkle.

Kurt observed it for a moment before he felt his bottom lip beginning to quiver. Somehow, Mr. Schue's kindness and the peanut butter had just sent him over the edge.

"Oh my god," he breathed, putting a cupped hand over his mouth as messy and uncontrollable sounds escaped. His hands ran up to his hair, which he gripped with a kind of desperation as his head dropped to be cradled in between his knees and he allowed himself a few deep, hollow sobs. With a last animalistic sound that Kurt had never imagined would ever pass his lips, he pushed all thoughts of his dad from his mind, rubbed his eyes, slowly stood, and crossed the shop.

He stopped in front of the car with the bent axel. He rubbed his eyes one last time before rolling himself beneath it and setting to work unscrewing things and working as a good worker should.

He sighed as a flake of dirt landed on his nose. He blew it off disgustedly and sneezed uncharacteristically loudly.

Tonight was going to be a long night.

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Thank you for reading and please review! Happy December. I will have Chapter Four posted within 2 days.


	4. Thursday, Part I: I'm trying to hold on

A/N: Hi and welcome to part four of Endless Night. The next two chapters will serve as relationship development for Kurt and Mercedes as well as just background info, so may be rather anticlimactic but necessary to the plot.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own _Glee_, _Lion King_, or _Heart of Darkness_.

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Kurt glared at the mirror in his locker, fussing with the olive green fedora ringed by a pleasantly bland gentlemanly bow that he had donned that morning. Though most people assumed he was rolling in superfluous pieces of fashion finery, the truth was that he could most certainly not afford most of the things he found "fashion fabulous," especially the jacket on the Gucci website that he had been coveting for months. Kurt snorted as he squinted at his reflection and rubbed in a spot of under eye concealer more thoroughly—four thousand seven hundred dollars was a little out of his price range.

He pushed the tip of his hat up a fraction of a millimeter, cocked his head to the side, blinked exaggeratedly a few times to wake himself up, then adjusted the neck of one of his more subdued "investment pieces" that his father had bought him for his fifteenth birthday, thinking it symbolic of some kind of understanding between himself and his son—a truce of sorts.

With a final glance at the tan-colored collar of his forest green Versace turtleneck, his right hand reached to close the locker door as his left fumbled with the latch on his leather satchel, preparing to hand in the worst English paper he had ever written in his entire life.

However, as Kurt felt the soft leather of the inside of the bag brush against his hand as his fingers closed around the cold metal paper clip and measly three pages of analysis, he jerked his head back toward his locker door, which was—much to his surprise—being held forcefully open by someone hiding on the other side.

Though Kurt's first assumption was that the person behind the locker was most likely one of the jocks he had insulted the afternoon before and his first reaction, accordingly, was to try to rush towards the girls bathroom or slip his arm through Mercedes'—a position which always made him appear much taller than he was—before they could slushie his facials away, he decided instead to be practical.

Kurt let the hand holding the English paper fall to his side as his eyes dropped to the floor, taking in the shoes of the person standing behind his locker door.

Black and white converse.

The stage right shoe began to tap impatiently.

Kurt's eyes followed from the top of the shoe to the hem of the pants—dark black, skinny jeans. As he made his way up the curvaceous and _not_ jock legs, he let out a great sigh of relief when his eyes fell upon the bottom of something which he had once called "Technicolored zebra skin."

Kurt plastered on a smile, feeling the corners of his mouth twitch slightly in protest. His resolve to not cry for the entire day had worked thus far, so he only smiled the harder as he shut the locker door gently and leaned against it, raising his eyes into his visitor's.

"Hello, Mercedes," he said, evening out the papers beneath the paper clip and lining the edges up subconsciously.

"Hey, Kurt," she said, looking him square in the face.

She didn't say anything else, and Kurt began to feel uncomfortable and found himself alternating his focus between the shiny rhinestone in the center of the star earring dangling from her left ear and the thin paperback book clutched at her side in her left hand.

She simply continued to stare at him. Neither smiling nor frowning. Simply looking in the same way she would at any other kid in the hallway. Her eyes seemed to make him physically hurt—he could just imagine his head bursting into flames (because surely even organic stuff was flammable) under the heat of her gaze.

Kurt swallowed and heard himself gasp slightly, pulling the English paper to his chest and crossing his arms, behind which the essay drooped limply, as he averted his eyes to the floor.

There was a brown skuff mark the size and approximate shape of Chile between the tips of his white leather shoes, just visible below the hem of his slightly-less-tight-than-normal white skinny jeans, and her black converse peeking out from just below the hems of her own black jeans.

Mercedes took a step closer to Kurt and gently pushed his chin up with the corner of the paperback in her hand.

"There's something wrong with you, boy," she said, not lessening the intensity of her gaze, though it had, Kurt thought, become tinged with concern.

Kurt stiffened inwardly.

Pity.

Last night he might have wanted pity. He would have given anything to have been able to collapse into Mr. Schuester's chest and sob like he hadn't sobbed since he was six and a half and realized that his mother would not be coming back from the hospital. Today, however—in the middle of the hallway right before AP Lit, clutching a pristine though poorly written essay, and having as of yet avoided wetting his artfully applied concealer with tears—he was not in the mood.

The Kurt that the entire jock population and a fair percentage of the underdogs had known, despised, and been repelled by for years reclaimed his masque in that revelation.

"Now, I understand if you don't want to talk to me about it, but you could at least tell me if there's anything I can—" Mercedes continued, but stopped abruptly as Kurt jerked his head away from the book gently resting beneath his chin.

With icy resolve and a glare that pained him to produce, he took a step toward Mercedes.

"Look, Mercedes," he said in a low voice, straightening his posture considerably to impress his four and a half inch height advantage upon her in a hetero-macho display that made his skin crawl, "I can't talk about this right now. I can't even tell you what you can do to 'help the situation.' I honestly don't need help. I'm fine. It'll blow over and, anyway, I've always done everything on my own. It's not like you would—"

But he stopped dead at the pained look on her face. The intensity in her gaze had turned instead to hurt and she looked at him as if she had never seen him before. In that moment, he knew good and well that since meeting Mercedes he had not had to do everything on his own. Most things, yes, but still not all.

Kurt stood absolutely still, five inches away from Mercedes and four inches above her, and somehow he could not muster up the energy to continue his unfair tirade. His mouth gaped slightly as he realized he did not know what to say, understanding that any witty or sharply sardonic insult he could throw at her would do nothing more than quickly unravel all the hours they had spent together over the past year, doing silly and trivial things that had somehow molded their friendship into a symbiotic relationship of giving and taking, with Kurt doing a lot of empty bitching but even more sympathetic listening and joking.

He closed his mouth abruptly and took a hasty step away from her, afraid of hurting her anymore than he already had. He uncrossed his arms and felt them fall to his sides, his left hand holding the essay loosely between shaking fingers. Kurt breathed in a rattly breath as he looked squarely into Mercedes eyes and became vaguely aware that his whole body was trembling slightly, the sheets of his paper seemingly vibrating against each other like dry leaves in the wind.

He certainly hated that sound—the sound crunchy and shriveled dead leaves made as the cold whipping wind of autumn forced them to bump and jostle each other, pulling them off the feeble branches of the trees and sending them sprawling into the eddying currents of the breeze, ripping them far apart from their home and the comfort of each other. Fall always represented impending death, he remembered vaguely. Seasons could be reliably counted on to symbolize the passage of time in nearly any piece of literature one picked up.

Mercedes' eyes snapped down as she too heard the rattling of his papers and then noticed the way his hand was trembling violently. She stepped back toward him and pulled the hand clutching the paper into her own, gently pulling the essay from his grip and slipping it under her right arm, pressing it against her body as she silently walked to Kurt's side and slipped her left arm through his right.

He immediately took the prompt and his arm moved to form the chivalrous hook he always provided her. For a moment they didn't move, but just stood silently side by side in the emptiness of the hallway that could only ever exist in the six minutes following the tardy bell.

"I'm sorry," Kurt said, turning his head to look down at her.

All hurt had disappeared from her visage as she turned her face up towards his own. It was devoid even of pity, for which Kurt was infinitely grateful.

"It's okay," she said, "I just want to know where my strong bitchin' diva has gone. And I can accept that you might not be ready to talk to me about it just yet, but I do want to let you know that I am always gonna be here for you, hell, whether you want me to be or not."

Mercedes started walking towards Kurt's English classroom. As they started down the stairs, she gave the arm she was holding onto a subtle squeeze.

"I know your type, boy, and I know how destructive they can be "unto themselves," as you would say. You've gotta let it out, Kurt, and not just in the practice room alone during lunch time or into your pillow alone at night. Singing and dancing are fantastic, I know," she justified, as she felt his arm tense up at her last statement, "but they aren't gonna get you through life unscathed, huh?"

It was a rhetorical and implied question, so Kurt did not reply, but instead nodded his head imperceptibly and swallowed thickly, clearing his throat slightly. They were four classrooms away from his destination.

"Thank you, Mercedes," he said, looking away from her and slowing their pace considerably. "I don't have much time this weekend, but I was wondering if maybe you would like to go to the Lima Mall instead of the American one even though it's farther away; we could switch it up for a change, what with the slow and painful death of American, anyway. And then we could either, you know, watch one of the DVDs I have or pick up that fantastic movie about Johnny Cash that came out a few years ago from that Blockbuster. I don't want you to think that I can't handle a friendship right—"

"Kurt," Mercedes said, stopping and steering him to face her.

She looked at him imploringly and his mouth immediately went dry with apprehension.

"I don't care what we do. I just want my Kurt back and that includes the personally painful sarcastic comments and diva attitude that come with the package," she joked sincerely.

Kurt forced a slight laugh and smiled nervously, preparing to offer her a jibe to satiate her maternal instinct.

His mouth twitched as it formed the tight-lipped scowl with which he always began insults. He allowed his eyes to harden as he turned his gaze on Mercedes and spouted, as if on autopilot, "Well, in that case, I think I'll have to donate your sweatshirt to the local VFW. They all love that safari riffraff and most are too color blind to take note of the horrific color combination screen printed upon it. That'll also put you with one foot fashion forward and heading in the right direction."

Mercedes smiled widely. "Mmhm," she nodded approvingly, "that's more like it."

She returned his English paper to him and gestured to the classroom they'd stopped outside.

He sighed and slumped slightly, unwillingly accepting his wretched excuse for a paper before pulling his posture back up and straightening his fedora, somehow managing to poke himself in the eye with his essay as he did so.

Mercedes laughed deeply and touched his arm gently, smoothing out a wrinkle in his sweater.

"Whatever's wrong with you, the day's almost over and tomorrow's Friday. That'll make anyone feel good."

Kurt smiled slightly. "You are right, as usual. Thanks again. I'll see you at rehearsal, my dearest Mercedes."

* * *

Thank you for reading and please review if you'd like to!


	5. Part II: Just waiting to hear your voice

A/N: Hi, and welcome to chapter five of Endless night.

DISCLAIMER: I own neither Glee, Lion King, Heart of Darkness, nor The Awakening.

* * *

He nodded goodbye to her, slipping into the cracked door of the AP Lit class in which each student sat hunched over a collection of short stories. He sidled as surreptitiously as possible to the teacher's desk, completely unnoticed by anyone in the room—even his teacher Mrs. McCurry—until he passed the second column of desks and felt a blunt impact and sharp twinge of pain in his back followed by the unmistakable sound of a pencil clattering to the ground upon glancing off it's target.

Kurt turned as dignifiedly as possible and plastered on a look that clearly said "I am irrefutably holier than thou" as he searched for the offender. His eyes fell on the only considerably intelligent jock on the football team who was smirking at him from behind the stiff collar of his letterman jacket.

Though Kurt hadn't normally deigned it necessary to remember any of the football players he had briefly played with the previous year, Jake Osterman had earned his attention after repeatedly stealing his towel after practice and leaving it hanging outside Tanaka's office; stuffing handfuls of condoms into the outer pocket of his leather satchel so, if they went unnoticed, they would fall from the open pocket and leave a trail behind him as he crossed the lot to his car; stealing various items from his locker and dropping them systematically like Hansel and Gretel until Kurt would finally pick up the last one and find himself in front of a dumpster where he would soon after be wrestled to the ground, scattering his belongings again, before they would pick him up and chuck him over the brim; and finally, challenging his vocabulary reservoir, though Kurt deftly beat him into the ground as he pulled out synonyms of antonyms of homonyms of autonyms related to contronyms and eponyms and hyponyms which all stemmed from metronyms and if Jake would have understood it, Kurt would have whipped out a _your mom _joke at that last one, but since he would indeed miss the irony Kurt thought he would skip out on an additional week of forced dumpster diving and settled for merely smacking him down, instead of smacking him down with the hand of god.

But as Kurt apologized to Mrs. McCurry for being late and placed the atrocious essay in which, he realized, he had really only complained about Edna's lack of resolve and willful personality, on her desk, he couldn't help but be unsettled by that smirk. And when Mrs. McCurry told him to take out his short stories anthology and start on _Heart of Darkness_—which he had already read—as he turned toward the third column of desks and sunk into the fourth chair back, he shuddered internally as Jake turned around, very nearly baring his teeth at him. He tore a sheet of paper out of the open notebook on his desk and folded it tightly before reaching diagonally from the third column of rows to slide it onto Kurt's desk.

Kurt ignored the tight triangular note for the rest of the period. He settled his satchel on the floor and slid his phone from his pocket to check that he hadn't missed any calls from the hospital or texts from his father, as he desperately hoped that his dad would have been awake for long enough to send him a message, to let him know that he was still hanging on and that the stupid chemo had not forced his cold into pneumonia or something ridiculous like that. Kurt did not really understand the medical jargon, but he did understand the gist, and he did not like the prospects.

Kurt pursed his lips as he allowed his pencil to lackadaisically bounce off the first sentence of a book he had only enjoyed for the beauty of the language, his fingers moving it in rhythm to the words he processed as he read. He allowed his eyes to scan the page, settling on the interesting bits and letting his memory fill in the rest.

_"In some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."_

Kurt sat up straighter in his chair, staring at the page blankly. First _Lion King _then _Heart of Darkness_? Were Elton John's sequiny karma buddies stalking him along with the spirit of James Conrad in some sort of conspiracy to shake Kurt out of his wits using words and imagery from an Africa long since abandoned? And Kate Chopin had decided to throw Edna's good ol' southern family's hand in, too?

Well, that was just absurd. He was being absurd.

So as the bell rang to dismiss class and Kurt hurriedly shoved the book into his bag, slipping his phone and that little note from the physically awkward but intelligent football player into his pocket, he hurried to the choir room, arriving early and settling at the piano.

Kurt pushed the lid up and pulled the sheet music for _Spring Awakening_ out of his bag, opening it to a random page. Before he placed his fingers on the keys, however, he dug into his pocket to find the note Jake had placed on his desk, which was no doubt full of some stupid insult regarding his sexuality that Jake would have found excessively clever and would assume would terrify the living daylights out of his little, gay, dancing ex-kicker.

Kurt snorted amusedly as his fingers deftly unfolded the note, though he fumbled as the paper pulled at a hangnail he had been unable to repair after catching one of his fingers in a spring the night before.

However, as he flourished the geometrically creased notebook paper as one would do with the morning news, his eyes caught sight of the words on the page, and he couldn't refrain from gasping audibly as they registered. Jake had certainly moved on from simple _fairies _and _faggots_. He was playing Kurt's way, but with a twist of his own. Kurt's ambiguous antagonism combined with his personal brand of effective and brutal terror.

Kurt slammed his forehead into the keys of the piano, inwardly cringing as a discordant noise filled the room and his fedora popped partly off his head revealing, he was sure, a terrible case of hat hair. Nonetheless, he couldn't be bothered to move.

He hadn't realized that Jake had been one of the jocks who had tried to stop him from getting to his car when he had thought he had confused them with his well-woven and vocabulary laden insult.

Kurt groaned and simply scooted just far enough back on the piano bench so that he could read the note that he had propped on top of his hands, clasped between the gap between his legs, as his forehead continued to dig into what he guessed were A below middle C to E below high C. His head wasn't abnormally large and it was just a portion of it touching anyway.

He sighed and bit his lip as his mind returned to the note. He would simply have to mull things over until the other Glee kids showed up and then plaster on his personality as the first one walked in the room.

He began to run his fingers nervously around the edge of the note, his mind beginning to enter panic mode against his will as it imagined more and more increasingly terrifying situations in which he might find himself at the hands of Jake Osterman. Puck and Finn had lost some degree of football status as Jake had marginally superseded them in the football social ranking at the end of Kurt's sophomore year.

Kurt heard himself laugh nervously.

And though he might have been fast and strong he was certainly no match for Jake when it came to sheer size, build, and weight.

He read the note one more time before he finally caved to the growing tightness in his chest, _"We'll see who's intellectually impoverished and sporting a room temperature IQ when I've finished with your sorry, fairy ass, Hummel. Disfigurement and drooling are both prerequisites for the Great White Way these days."_

He did not have time to deal with some boy with a brain like a Cro-Magnon and a body like a Neanderthal. He barely had time for school, Glee, the garage, and visiting his dad. And to top it off, he was about to cry and he had promised himself he would not cry for the whole day because he had cried far too much that week and really, he thought, crying just sort of encouraged bad things to happen, right? It allowed for them to be okay.

Kurt was certainly not feeling quite like himself.

So instead of crying, Kurt sat up with a straightened back as he tried to pull his masque back on. However, as his hands began to shake violently Kurt found it impossible to catch his breath. He clutched the note tight in his hand and watched it swirl in front of his eyes, as if he had a bad case of vertigo. Though he did not know it then, Kurt was experiencing what he would soon come to recognize as his first panic attack.

And that's how Finn and Rachel found Kurt two minutes later—wide eyed and breathing hard, clutching a piece of paper crumpled up in his fist—as they sauntered into the room, early for the 2:30 rehearsal.

* * *

Thank you so much for reading, and do review if you'd like to. :)


	6. Part III: When will the dawning break?

Welcome to part 6 of Endless Night! I've experimented with POV shifts here, so I do hope it worked.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Glee, Lion King or Rent.

* * *

The minute Kurt saw Rachel and Finn step inside the practice room—albeit through a slight fog—he tried to bolt to the side door, hoping to save the last few remnants of his dignity by a hasty escape into the cold sunlight. However, he swayed dangerously at the sudden movement and, before he could even process what was happening, found himself being roughly pushed back to a sitting position on the piano bench as he continued to gulp for air.

Finn, he registered, was kneeling in front of him with a hand resting on the piano bench on either side of his thighs, peering into his face concernedly. Rachel had run from the room, her yellow skirt swinging as she burst out the door into the hallway, calling for Mr. Schuester at the top of her voice. Kurt felt as if the world were surely about to end because he could not think of any other plausible reason as to why he had suddenly lost all control of his various bodily systems—convulsing, shaking, gasping for breath, sweating, crying, feeling like he hadn't spotted for a whole line of chaine turns.

He tried to calm himself down by breathing deeply but somehow could not focus—which only confused him further as his focus was usually impeccable—so instead began to desperately roll the note between his hands around and around until it condensed into a ball, just wanting to do something—anything—to get his mind to settle and his body to stop rebelling but that did not seem to help so he shuddered and tried with all his might—dammit!—he thought before—

A hand drifted into his line of vision and gently stilled his frantic hands, pulling the paper ball from between them and setting it somewhere out of his sight. Kurt looked up, feeling tears falling from his eyes as he suddenly became even more infuriated with himself for his weakness. Finn still knelt before him and, Kurt deducted even through the haziness created by a mind on overdrive, had been talking for however long it had been since he and Rachel had come across his freakish and uncontrollable display of emotion.

Kurt could only concentrate on the freckles that speckled Finn's nose as he struggled to hear what Finn was saying, but the roaring in his ears was just too much for him to handle and he didn't dare open his mouth to try to tell him not to worry about him. Even in his altered consciousness, he knew that was A) absurd and B) would only end in him sounding more like an unbalanced loco than he already appeared.

So he sat. And shook. And tried to breathe properly while concentrating on those light light freckles on Finn's cheeks, inadvertently flinching and pulling away when Finn put his hands on Kurt's shoulders to calm him.

His body did not approve of this contact.

His breathing became even more hurried and his throat clenched up—he began to see black spots at the edges of his vision—losing consciousness because of excess carbon dioxide in the blood stream, i.e. hyperventilation? Human anatomy, ninth grade, he thought distractedly—and his head lolled forward, slightly too heavy to hold up. He was sure Finn was panicking at this point.

So he fought to pull his head back up and squint through his spotted vision. Pushing himself, forcing himself, to breathe, breathe, breathe.

The second Mercedes rushed into the room, however, he almost felt himself melt with relief despite his state. She ran full speed over to Kurt and gently straightened his fedora before roughly bumping Finn out of the way with an angry looking insult and simply settling beside Kurt on the piano bench, taking one of his hands in her own, and squeezing it gently. She ran a worried hand up and down his right arm with just enough pressure to say "I'm here" and not enough to send his body into another wave of threatened protests.

Kurt looked at his lap—focusing intently on the folded fabric that always stretched from pocket to pocket when he sat—as he brought his free arm across his chest and cradled his ribcage, bending forward slightly to hover over the hand on which Mercedes was gently rubbing circles. He felt her drop in front of him, subconsciously calming him by providing a shield behind which he was not visible to the other Glee kids who had slowly filled the room. He felt the warmth and weight of her hand press against the fabric of his Versace sweater as she gently placed it on his left shoulder blade, willing him to calm down, to come closer.

And in the moment that he allowed his head to lean forward onto her shoulder as she moved forward and wrapped her arms around him, singing something low and soft under her breath, Kurt caught a glimpse of his teammates—even the newest members—staring at him from various points around the room with mixed looks of shock, concern, horror, pity, and— Wait, was that disgust? God, Puck…

And with that, he knew that Glee Club was either going to become very hard to attend or completely unbearable, and he would just have to see which one panned out once he got back into his right mind. He would not let his own drama bring the club down, and nor did he intend to allow any well-meaning Glee friends to bring even more drama into his own life by trying to rectify a problem that they did not even understand. There were some things for which he would simply not stand, infringement on his personal life being one of them.

Kurt didn't realize until his thoughts had become more and more sentient with the passing minutes that his breathing had evened out and his head had stopped spinning.

As Mr. Schue ran into the room followed by a panting Rachel, he could first only take in the shocked looks on his other students' faces. However, as his eyes connected with Finn's, who had backed to the wall after whatever insult Mercedes had thrown at him, he realized that the eerie silence coming from Mercedes and the figure slumped on her shoulder was what had so enthralled his companions.

Mr. Schue's mouth fell open slightly as he slowly walked toward Kurt. His face was completely buried into Mercedes' shoulder, the rest of his head hidden by the brim of the fedora. From a wet spot on the hot pink of Mercedes' sweatshirt, Mr. Schue deduced that Kurt had been crying copiously but silently for a minute, at least. Every few seconds a hiccup would shake the boy's back.

Yes, Mr. Schue thought, _boy _was the appropriate descriptor at this point.

This was not the Kurt who could belt out girls' songs in front of an entire classroom; who could pull off a pink bow tie, v-neck sweater, and black converse all on the same day; who could wear overalls and grease stains with as much dignity as if he'd just walked through the street side door of _Vogue_ magazine; who had stoically endured dumpster dumping, slushie throwing, and hurled insults for as long as Mr. Schue had had him as a student; who had, according to Finn, resigned from the football team one day after practice by sashaying into the shower room, slipping into one of the dividers, sudsing up his hair, and announcing as loudly as he could to the room at large that he hoped they could enjoy the rest of their season as he would, unfortunately, be unable to continue playing with such overbearing Neanderthals due to scheduling conflicts—he had then washed the soap from his hair, thrown his towel over his shoulder, and sashayed out as energetically as he had sashayed in, pulling on a clean pair of shorts and a t-shirt before veritably bouncing out the locker room door to his car.

No, Mr. Schue thought, this was not the same Kurt. This Kurt was quickly falling apart as a result of some cause Mr. Schue had yet to decipher.

Just as he also knelt beside Kurt, feeling the pressure of all the eyes on his back and utterly pitying the boy before him, a sudden vibration caused Kurt to jump. Mercedes looked at him concernedly as he stared down at his pocket. It was not until a chorus of very loud voices began singing "We're not gonna pay/last year's rent, this year's rent, next year's rent/Rent! Ren—" that Mercedes had slid a hand into the small front pocket of Kurt's white jeans and, tugging slightly to remove the phone, gently asked if he wanted to answer it.

He shook his head and looked up at her. "You."

Mr. Schuester had to hold back a gasp as he looked at the face of the student he had seen not two hours previously, sitting across the desk from him in his office. Kurt had said yes to the independent study and had immediately cracked open the collection of Gabriel Garcia Marquez stories Mr. Schuel had given him to read in the meantime, eyes scanning the first page hungrily as Mr. Schue headed out for his lunch break.

Then, he had been smiling and laughing, with even skin and rosy cheeks accentuating his positivity. But now, as Mr. Schue looked at the streaks of concealer and blush that had run down his face, revealing strips of pale purple skin beneath his eyes and pallid lines cutting through the pink of his cheeks, Mr. Schue realized that everything Kurt did served as a shield. His unimpeachable school work, flawless performances, and pristine outfits served only to make him feel safe and secure, allowing him to hide behind an image and bury himself in activities which made him untouchable to those who might seek to get behind it all.

It wasn't until Mr. Schue realized that Artie had wheeled himself over to Kurt's side, tentatively placing a gloved hand on his right leg as Finn hovered awkwardly above Kurt's left shoulder, that Mercedes finally answered the phone.

"Hello?" she said forcefully.

Kurt strained his ears to listen, still carefully avoiding the glances of the other students. Nonethless, he smiled thankfully at Artie who gave his leg a tender, reassuring squeeze before dropping his hand back into his lap and wheeling back a few paces.

Mr. Schue felt his eyes water at this gesture that most boys would have balked at performing, yet Artie had done it so naturally and so instinctively and Kurt reacted so calmly after such a traumatic episode that, to Mr. Schue, both boys seemed to age immensely in that moment.

His thoughts were interrupted as Mercedes exclaimed in a somewhat offended manner, "Excuse me? Lima Health System? I think you've got the wrong number."

Mr. Schue turned his attention back to Mercedes and Kurt just in time to see Kurt's head whip up and his hand shoot out of his lap to grab the phone out of Mercedes' hand just as she was about to sweep her hand over the phone's screen to end the call.

Kurt smiled at her weakly, his eyes begging her to remain calm and oh-please-do-not-blow-up-my-dear, as he pressed the phone against his ear and said calmly and quietly, "Hi, this is Kurt Hummel. How may I help you?"

* * *

Thank you for reading and please do review/comment/critique etc!

Love,

UnnamedElement


	7. Part IV: Oh, endless night

Hi, and welcome to chapter seven of Endless Night.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Glee or Lion King.

* * *

He stood slowly, Mercedes' hand trailing down the sleeve of his sweater as he walked past Artie, pulling an arm across his chest again and gripping his side, his back slightly curved, as he walked deliberately to the farthest corner of the room and leaned against the wall—phone still glued to his ear—with his back to the other students who had begun to assemble around the piano, leaning in toward Mercedes and grouping around Finn.

As Kurt glanced back, he saw Mr. Schue trying to push his way through the throng of Glee kids toward Kurt, but Finn had put his arm on Mr. Schue's shoulder and turned him away from Kurt, shrugging gently as Mr. Schue acquiesced.

As Kurt spoke, however—apologizing for missing the appointment, begging for the doctor to reschedule it for _just thirty minutes later, please!_ and asking about the cold (wait, pneumonia?) and chemo and couldn't they just let him in after visiting hours today, for God's sake? he hadn't meant to miss his opportunity the day before, shit just _arose_ he enunciated clearly… but wait, really?—he turned himself to lean his back against the wall, watching the Glee kids from across the room.

As they huddled around Finn and Mercedes, clearly asking for info, Kurt noticed that their faces no longer held shock and horror or, in Puck's case, disgust. They only threw worried glances back toward Kurt as he finished his conversation and attempted to walk as nonchalantly as possible back toward the group of people he had come to call _close-as-you-can-get-to-friends_ which was, perhaps, really just Kurt's way of saying _friends_ or, at least, _frenemies_.

As they all turned to face him with their own versions of worry playing across their features, Kurt drew himself up to his full height—correcting his posture—straightened his sweater, adjusted the turtleneck, and felt around the brim of his hat to make sure the gentlemanly bow was still facing the proper direction. He cracked a small smile, one that he knew had become trademark over the past few weeks—strained and tight and all stretched lips.

"I apologize for that episode," Kurt began, "I really do. And I don't normally apologize but, then again, I don't normally fall apart. That was really quite unreal and I really cannot believe I just let myself get that far in front of so many of you but—" at this point he stopped and drew in a deep and shaking breath, willing himself to calm down; his eyes flickered to the floor before looking up with resolve. "Well, I apologize for my lack of committed response during rehearsal over the past couple of days; I understand if you'd rather I just not perfor—"

But at that point Rachel stepped toward him, closing the gap between the group of bodies and Kurt's solitary one.

"Kurt," she began softly but with a directness unique only to Rachel Berry, "Are you sick?"

If Kurt had not been emotionally and physically exhausted he would have come up with a contained but explosive response, simply because she was Rachel and thought they _had _come to terms with one another and were tentatively _sometimes_ friends she should simply not be the person approaching him about such a sensitive issue. Instead, he settled for reverting to the introduction of the spiel he'd given her the year before when they'd argued about Finn.

Taking a step toward her, he tried to pull that hard and cold look back onto his face. However, as he looked down at her from his half-foot advantage, he barely managed a weak, "Here's the dope, princess…" before pulling in a sharp intake of breath and looking away from her, moving apologetically out of her personal space.

That seemed to scare Rachel more than any words he could have spat at her.

He looked at his feet and opened his mouth again, preparing to say something, _anything_—did that mean he had to explain?

But this time a hurt-looking Mercedes stepped forward slightly, trailed by Tina who had her fingers placed lightly on Mercedes' arm, standing only two strides behind Rachel, who stood stock-still. Not ever Mr. Schuester moved.

Kurt felt his hands find the hem of his sweater and they began to shake again as he ran them nervously back and forth across the fabric. He saw Puck's eyes narrow at the movement, so he crossed his arms in front of him and pulled a hard glare out of his emotionally exhausted repertoire to throw at him before Mercedes spoke up, voice trembling.

"You're not, are you, Kurt?" She looked at him imploringly.

Kurt took a deep breath and looked up at the rest of the club, "No," he said evenly. "No. I'm not."

Several sighs of relief escaped the group.

"What about the hospital, then?" Puck asked loudly, giving Kurt a sharp, condescending nod. "If you're not sick, what did they want with you? You get tested for some sort of gay disease or what?"

Kurt's mouth fell open and he stared disbelievingly at Puck. Did the football player truly have no sense of couth and decorum? Kurt felt his mouth close and fall open again, so he shut it forcefully and adjusted his hat with as much dignity as he could muster.

"Well, what, then?" Puck pushed on.

Kurt turned to Mr. Schuester for help but Mr. Schue simply looked at him sadly, before offering an intentionally weak "Puck, you're out of line."

Kurt really did not want to explain this right now. He began to mentally calculate how long he would have after getting back from the hospital to do two cars, memorize an act's worth of lines, and finish reading _Heart of Darkness._

"Did it have anything to do with that freak panic attack you had just now?" Puck continued, actually stepping toward Kurt.

Kurt snapped, his eyes narrowing, and he moved toward Puck with such a rate of speed that Rachel, Mercedes, and Tina all jumped with surprise as he brushed past them. Mr. Schue, who had blinked, shook his head slightly as he turned to face the pair in their new position.

"How dare you," Kurt hissed, half a foot away from Puck, staring up into his face with hard eyes.

"Look, dude, I know what a panic attack looks like," Puck raised an eyebrow at Kurt's anger. "My little sister used to have them all the time and I'd have to, y'know, calm her down and make sure she didn't get too scared."

Kurt's anger didn't subside, though it did become considerably more reserved as he looked as squarely as he could into Puck's face. "Frankly, I don't understand your concern nor do I see how you relating this story of kindness to your sister is supposed to in any way influence how I feel about you, considering you dumped me into a dumpster just last week—"

"That was on a dare, man! Get over it!" Puck interjected.

Kurt held up a hand to silence him, gently lowering one finger at a time in a slightly overlapping wave as he waited for Puck to stop gawking. When he had, Kurt fixed him with a look and dropped the hand to his hip, cocking his head to the side and popping his hip before continuing.

"And I hardly find it compelling as is as I can scarcely imagine you being that kind to _anybody_, let alone a younger sibling who I have heard, but wouldn't know, are quite terrible pains."

Kurt only felt slightly bad, as he knew his statement wasn't completely true. Nonetheless, he glared unblinkingly at Puck, wishing for once he would react to his cold stare.

Mr. Schuester finally stepped in, wishing he hadn't allowed Puck to keep pushing Kurt just so he could finally know what was wrong with him. He put a gentle hand on both Kurt and Puck's shoulders, letting go of Puck's as he stepped backward, Kurt's feet following his listlessly.

Kurt didn't stop staring at Puck, though.

And as Mr. Schue stood beside Kurt and the rest of the Glee club watched on with a mix of trepidation and high interest, Puck pulled the ball of paper that he had found discarded on the piano out of his pocket. He unfolded it and held it out for the whole group to see.

Kurt swallowed thickly. Mr. Schuester's eyes squinted as he strained to read the messy script.

* * *

Thanks for reading! Love, Elizabeth


	8. Part V: Sleepless I dream of the day

Hi, everyone! Thank you for sticking around. Here's part eight of Endless Night. This will be the last one for a few days/week as my Spanish creative writing class is eating me.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Glee, Lion King, or Spring Awakening.

* * *

"This have anything to do with it, Hummel?" Puck asked, accentuating his question with a flourish of the page.

Kurt pulled away from Mr. Schue, calmly removing the paper from Puck's hands before folding it carefully and shoving it into his pocket.

What happened next made everyone in the room shiver slightly.

Kurt fixed Puck with an unwavering glare and laughed hollowly, face completely devoid of emotion.

"That, Puck, is the least of my problems."

A year ago, Puck would have pinned Kurt up against a locker and yanked on the neck of his sweater until Kurt couldn't breathe enough to make any more snide remarks, but today he just felt sad. And a little scared. Because even after all those years he had shoved Kurt into walls, thrown him into dumpsters, partnered with him on in-class assignments just so he could verbally abuse him and get a one hundred percent, Kurt had never delivered one of his blows so coldly. Generally the coldness of the eyes would be set off by a joking tone in the voice, or the coldness of the voice would be balanced by resentful and disgusted eyes. There were emotions in one or the other. There always had been.

Kurt turned quickly and stepped away from him, weaving his way through the piano to shove his _Spring Awakening_ book into his bag before throwing it over his shoulder and walking toward the side door of the choir room.

"I really can't stay for rehearsal today, Mr. Schue. Remember, I told you last night I had a prior engagement this afternoon and well, I've already missed it and really ought to try to make it up. I'm sorry."

Mr. Schue just nodded weakly. He had no idea how he was supposed to handle a situation like this without making it worse.

He had planned on just letting Kurt walk out, but just as Kurt pushed the door open, letting the cold breeze sweep in and the diluted autumn sun stream through the opening, catching the pale colors in Kurt's eyes and refracting so they appeared light grey, Mr. Schue spoke up.

"Kurt?" Mr. Schue asked in a pained voice.

And if it hadn't been for the sincere concern in Mr. Schue's pronunciation of his name, he would have kept walking, but his teacher had been too nice in the past two days to ignore now.

Instead, he sighed and turned to face Mr. Schue and the rest of the Glee kids still grouped around the piano.

Mr. Schue just looked at him as if willing him to offer the answer without the question. Kurt did not want to do it, but he knew he ought to. He had ended up eating that granola bar after all. A one hundred eighty calorie sacrifice at that.

Kurt sucked in a breath and looked into Mr. Schue's face.

"You know how I said my dad was ill and sleeping?"

Mr. Schue nodded awkwardly. This reversal of roles was a bit unsettling to him.

"That much is true. It's just he wasn't upstairs, as I said…"

Mr. Schue watched Kurt carefully, hoping he would continue.

Kurt drew in another shuddering breath, eyes dropping to the floor.

"My dad's been in the hospital for two weeks."

Mercedes mouth gaped open slightly, probably wondering how she had not noticed anything in all the time she spent at Kurt's house, and Kurt felt Finn's eyes turn toward him. Finn walked over to Kurt numbly. When Kurt looked at Finn, he was surprised to see a depth of emotion greater than that he had seen on Finn's face the day he had repeatedly punched Puck's face in in the exact same spot that they now stood.

"What happened?" Finn asked softly, trying not to look uncomfortable as Kurt blinked rapidly, swallowed stiffly, and crossed his arms, shifting his weight backward onto his right leg, allowing his left to pop out slightly.

Kurt looked up at him, he felt the surface tension on his tears building, threatening to pour over as they clung to his lower eyelid and pushed at his lashes.

"He has cancer. Lung cancer," Kurt swallowed again, more slowly. "Stage IV as of five minutes ago."

Finn tried to put a hand on Kurt's shoulder but he turned too rapidly and was out the door before he could hear the sad gasps and pitying whispers. The centrifugal force pushed the tears over the levees as he turned and he felt them run down his cheeks, collecting in the corners of his mouth and chilling in the cool air. They tasted as bitter as they had the day before.

Unfortunately, half a step toward the lot he paused and whipped back toward the door. He contemplated just waiting until Mercedes left the building but timidly stuck his head around the frame instead.

"Um, Mercedes, I don't have a car anymore, could you maybe…" He stepped fully back inside as he trailed off.

Mercedes had crossed the room and put an arm around Kurt's waist before he had even finished his request. She nodded firmly and guided him out the door, looking over her shoulder concernedly as they exited.

She hadn't, however, missed Mr. Schue's childish _Call me_ symbol he had made with his hands as he watched them go. So she nodded imperceptibly before crossing the parking lot with the shell of her best friend on her arm, settling him into the car and waiting patiently for him to speak.

She was trying very hard not to be offended that he had withheld something so important from her, something that he would have had to know about for months, at least. However, as she watched Kurt turn towards her, trying his best to smile, she simply adjusted his fedora and smiled one of her own—the ones Kurt always said were worth a million dollars; a Crest Whitestrips ad; and a Grammy, Tony, Oscar, Globe and Emmy combined (he even sometimes tacked on Sundance)—before turning the car on and backing out of the space.

As Kurt sighed and watched the road to the hospital whip by, Mercedes put a hand on his leg and squeezed gently.

She wasn't mad.

Kurt placed his hand over hers, turning toward her and shrugging one shoulder gently, simultaneously smiling a tiny sincere smile even as his eyes brimmed with tears.

Mercedes turned back to the road.

She couldn't be mad.

She'd seen that smile a year before when he'd sacrificed his everything for that of his dad's, as he let go of that final note and smiled so sadly and shrugged so innocently as the Glee club had clapped conciliatorily.

That was sacrifice. This was sacrifice.

And she understood.

* * *

Thanks for reading and do leave a review for comment/critique if you are so inclined!

Best,

Elizabeth


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